Tech Culture: Steve Jobs reveals Macbook Air

Tech Culture: Steve Jobs reveals Macbook Air

5:32 /
October 5, 2011

Apple shows off the world's thinnest laptop computer.

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>> Today, we're introducing a third kind of notebook. It's called the MacBook Air. It's so thin it even fits inside one of these envelops that we've all seen floating around the office. And so, let me go ahead and show it to you now.
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[ Audience cheering ]
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>> This is it.
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Let me take it out here.
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[ Audience cheering ]
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>> This is the new MacBook Air. And you can get a feel for how thin it is. Yeah, there it is. Look at this. This is what it looks like, and incredible. It's the world's thinnest notebook. You open it up. It's got a magnetic latch, so there's no hooks or things to catch on your clothing. And it's got a full size 13.3 inch widescreen display. And the display is gorgeous. It's an LED backlit display and not only does that save power and not only does that give a really bright display, but it's instant on the minute you open it. On top of the display is a built-in iSight camera for video conferencing right out of the box. And you flip it down there is a full-sized keyboard. This is perhaps the best notebook keyboard we've ever shipped. It's a phenomenal keyboard and it's full-sized. And with the ambient light sensor, it's also backlit. We've got a very generous track pad, which is great. We've also built in multi-touch gesture support. Now, as you know, our current Notebooks have some gestures built-in we've taken that even further. When you go to Preferences in the MacBook Air, you'll actually get to turn on all sorts of other types of gestures and there's actually videos in there to show you what they are. So, let me run through them with you now. You wanna rotate the photo, this works in iPhoto and all the other photo apps. Just rotate like this. Again, we've taken some of these things we learned in the iPhone and now, we're putting them in our Notebook computers. How do we fit a Mac in here? How do we do it? I'm still stunned that our engineering team can pull this off. Let's look at the bottom, take off the bottom. And there's three things in here: The battery, hard disk and the electronics. On the hard disk, we went to 1.8-inch hard drives. We shipped tens of millions of these in iPods, we know them well. And they're great. And so, the MacBook Air ships with an 80-gigabyte hard disk of standard and there's an option of a 64-gigabyte solid state disk if you'd like it. These are a little pricey, but they are fast. But the real magic is in the electronics. This is a complete Mac on a board. Let's take off the cooling system. That's a complete Mac on this board. Then you think well, okay, what's so special about that? This is how big the board is. It's really tiny. And we didn't compromise on performance. MacBook Air uses the Intel Core 2 Duo. This is a really speedy processor. It's what we use in all of our other Notebooks and our iMax, 1.6-gigahertz standard and there's an option to go to 1.8-gigahertz if you want. On one of the sides we got the MagSafe connector. We've got a smaller 45- watt power adaptor that also comes with the MacBook Air. On the other side we got the flip-down door that exposes USB 2.0 port, a micro-DVI connector with digital and analog video and a headphone jack. And maybe most importantly, we built-in the most advanced wireless network in technology, 802.11n right into MacBook Air along with Bluetooth 2.1 plus EDR. So, the latest and greatest in wireless technology, the MacBook Air was built to be a wireless machine. We also didn't want to compromise on battery life. And so, MacBook Air when you're doing e-mail, you're browsing the web, wireless networking is turned on 5 hours of battery life. And we are pricing this notebook at just $1799. And we commence shipping MacBook Airs in just two weeks. We'll start to take orders today, pre-order on the online store if you'd like. We'll be shipping in 2 weeks.